Legatio Ad Gaium

But no doubt he with great felicity gave a new representation of the medical skill of Apollo, for this god was the inventor of healing medicines, [*](This is one of the attributes of Apollo of which he boasts to Daphne. Inventum medicina meum est, opiferque per orbem Dicor et herbarum subjecta potentia nobis: Hic mihi quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis Nec prosunt domino quae prosunt omnibus artes.Met.1.461. Or as it is translated by Dryden— Medicine is mine; what herbs and simples grow In fields and forests, all their powers I know, And am the great physician called below. Alas, that fields and forests can afford No remedies to heal their love-sick lord. To cure the pains of love no plant avails, And his own physic the physician fails.) so as to cause health to men, thinking fit himself to heal the diseases which were inflicted by others, by reason of the excessive mildness and gentleness of his own nature and habits,

but this man, on the contrary, loads those who are in good health with disease, and inflicts mutilations on those who are sound, and in short visits the living with most cruel death, caused by the hand of man before the time of their natural death, preparing every imaginable engine of destruction in abundant plenteousness, by means of which, if he had not himself been previously put to death in accordance [*]( This is one of the attributes of Apollo of which he boasts to Daphne. Inventum medicina meum est, opiferque per orbem Dicor et herbarum subjecta potentia nobis: Hic mihi quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis Nec prosunt domino quae prosunt omnibus artes.Met.1.461. Or as it is translated by Dryden— Medicine is mine; what herbs and simples grow In fields and forests, all their powers I know, And am the great physician called below. Alas, that fields and forests can afford No remedies to heal their love-sick lord. To cure the pains of love no plant avails, And his own physic the physician fails. )

For his designs were prepared against all those in authority and all those possessed of riches, and especially against those in Rome and those in the rest of Italy, by whom such quantities of gold and silver had been treasured up that even if all the riches of all the rest of the habitable world had been collected together from its most distant borders, it would have been found to be very inferior in amount.

On this account he began, he, this hater of the citizens, this devourer of the people, this pestilence, this destructive evil, began to banish all the seeds of peace from his country, as if he were expelling evil from holy ground;

for Apollo is said to have been not only a physician but also an excellent prophet, by his oracular predictions announcing what was likely to conduce to the advantage of mankind, in order that no one, being overshadowed by uncertainty, going on without seeing his way before him like a blind man, might hastily fall into unexpected evils as if they were the greatest benefits; but that men having previously acquired a knowledge of the future as if it were really present, and looking at it with the eye of their mind, might guard against future evils just as they can see evils actually before them with the bodily eye, and in this way secure themselves against any irremediable disaster.